ESPN’s Search for the Ultimate Sports Star

ESPN is running a contest called “Who’s Now,” an attempt to determine “the ultimate sports star.” Each day on the sports network’s “SportsCenter” show, anchor Stuart Scott and three panelists debate which of two athletes is more “now” — a measure combining athletic accomplishment, marketability and buzz. The 32 athletes being considered overall (a pool chosen by ESPN from athletes nominated by readers) will be winnowed down to one during the month based on voting by the panel and ESPN viewers. Nearly 100,000 people voted in the latest round, when New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez outpolled Terrell Owens of the Dallas Cowboys.

Barcelona’s Ronaldinho is a hit on Google, but can he beat out Kobe Bryant in an ESPN contest?

For today’s matchup, between soccer star Ronaldinho and the NBA’s Kobe Bryant, a teaser on the front page of espn.com says, “Ronaldinho crushed Kobe in a Google search, 16.7 million results to 2.3 million. But can the Brazilian soccer star win here?”

Using search-result counts is a silly way to judge the admittedly arbitrary contest pitting athletes from different sports against each other. They change from search to search; my check of Ronaldinho this morning garnered a mere 15.7 million results. They’re approximations, often internally inconsistent — a search for Kobe Bryant, no quotes, gets fewer results than a search for “Kobe Bryant” even though the latter should exclude some pages where the words aren’t consecutive. The counts are often inaccurate, as I noted in a 2005 column. And they vary widely by search engine. On Yahoo, Mr. Bryant beats Ronaldinho, 17.1 million to 14.8 million. (Though a Yahoo search for “Kobe Bryant” with quotation marks gets just 7.38 million hits.)

Most importantly, search results don’t indicate much in the way of meaningful analysis. If almost no one is visiting the Web pages past the first 100,000 search results, who cares how many millions of them there are? Already, two first-round losers in the Who’s Now competition — snowboarder/skateboarder Shaun White and soccer midfielder David Beckham — outnumbered their conquerors — NBA guard Dwyane Wade and NFL running back LaDainian Tomlinson — in Google search results by two and six times, respectively.

Also, with the Web 14 years old and many older pages living on, a count of Web pages says a lot about who was then. Michael Jordan, who is neither in the contest nor in active sports, has an estimated 46 million Google search results — more than any of the contestants. Or he did earlier this morning; a more recent check nets 42.4 million.

An ESPN spokesman said the teaser, which was the first time search-result counts were used to promote the contest, was meant to indicate Ronaldinho’s extensive Web presence, while leaving it to voters to decide whether the Google results are significant.

What do you think? Are search-engine counts meaningful? How would you determine “who’s now” in sports? Let me know in the comments.

Further reading: A Time Magazine feature relies on Google News and Google Blog search-result counts to measure the newsiness of newsmakers. I questioned its methodology in March. A recent edition of The Score saw Julia Roberts edging Rosie O’Donnell.

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